Summer Food, Part I: Corn

A very useful plant and an easy corn on the cob recipe

On Monday we covered my favorite summer food, today we are talking about Chaya’s favorite: Sweet Corn.  Without exaggeration I am pretty sure that she could eat it every day of the year.

What is corn?  Technically it is a grass and can be referred to as either its Latin name Zea Mays or “the new world crop” from the days of the explorers.  Native to the Americas, it has been very well received by people and dates as one of the first crops to be domesticated. 

The corn plant itself is fascinating in how it grows, how much of it we grown in America and how many uses there are for the quintessential row crop.  Corn is a monoecious plant—that is that one plant contains the male  and female  reproductive parts (it is wind pollinated).  Like wheat, a corn kernel has three parts: pericarp (the bran or “wrapper”), endosperm (the starchy sweet stuff in the kernel that is the fuel for the plant) and the germ (the engine of the life form that will develop into a new corn plant). 

Corn needs water at the right time, but not too much.  Check out these three photos of the same corn field growing in one week intervals.  Week 2 was just before a rain after a long dry spell and week three really shows the vitality of the plant coming out. 

 

 

 

The big deal about corn is that it is a big crop.  According to the USDA, the United States produces almost as much corn than its next three competitors: China, Brazil and the European Union combined (USDA, 2012).  With all of that bulk you have to start asking some tough questions about methodologies and best practices.  GMO technology is associated with corn like genuine cheese steaks are associated with Philadelphia.  That level of monocropping generally means that there is a significant complementary chemical load by necessity.  Watch this video to see modern corn production: 

 

 

 

There are so many uses for a corn plant, everything from corn starch to ethanol.  All that starch in one concentrated form has brought new levels of innovation to modern industrial product development that mostly zero in on corn starch.  Corn may not taste super sweet, but soda pop sure does; so how does it get so sugary sweet?    

Basically, starch is “long chain” sugar which gets broken down into “short chain” sugars (which are sweeter to human taste buds) by catalysts or enzymes.  Enzymes in your body break down all food into glucose.  In industrial food processing, these same enzymes can break long chain starch very short change fractions or more specifically: high fructose corn syrup. 

Different enzymes and different timing uncouple different quantities of cars, forming different syrups.  Break up only a few long sections of the train with the enzyme alpha amylase (the same that is in your saliva) and you get just plain corn syrup, thick with its big molecules.  Break up more of the train with glucose amylase, delinking most of the molecules down to the smallest (glucose), and you get dextrose train cars via a third enzyme, glucose isomerase, and, bingo, you get high fructose corn syrup (Ettlinger, 2007). 

Our favorite corn recipe starts by getting it straight from the farm stand or by growing it yourself.  You are working against the clock here, so working quickly is the best method.  You are looking for the plump, sweet ears of sweet corn. 

After you buy (or better yet pick) the corn on the cob you will need to shuck it.  Generally this works best in the hands of children doing this outside.  Meanwhile, have the pot of water at a rolling boil.  Put the cleaned ears of corn in the pot and boil for seven minutes or less.  Peak perfect corn is on the plate 14 minutes after you pick it to give you an idea.  Most people like it with butter and salt, but I take mine plain.  Good corn is like a steak; if it needs sauce, it is not a good steak. 

Wilson

Pro Deo et Patria

Works Cited:

USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service. (2012). Crop explorer, major crop regions, global view: Corn. Retrieved from website: http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/cropexplorer/cropview/CommodityView.cfm?cropid=0440000&selected_year=2011

Ettlinger, S. (2007). Twinkie, deconstructed, my journey to discover how the ingredients found in processed foods are grown, mined (yes, mined), and manipulated into what a. (First printing,March 2007 ed., Vol. 1, pp. 61-62). London: Hudson st Pr.

GMO corn cartoon is from Corn Time by Bob Lang (the picture is also a link)